ShareThisIn a move to track down uncounted Spanish-speakers, the U.S. Census Bureau is traveling to schools and telling children to explain the once-a-decade headcount to their parents. And the Census Bureau has enlisted a Spanish-language soap to include the census theme as a story line.
If fearful immigrants refuse to be counted, it could cost towns and cities much-needed government money.
For the 2010 Census, the bureau has partnered with the Hispanic TV network Telemundo. A census storyline was written into the telenovela "Más Sabe El Diablo."
On the homefront, many children are translators for their Spanish-speaking relatives. So talking to the kids is another way of talking to the parents, said Dave Rodriguez, a "partnership specialist" with the Los Angeles Regional Census Center. Rodriguez, who is coordinating with 360 partner groups in Ventura County to ensure that the Census Bureau gets as complete a count as possible.
He said that when parents don't speak English, it is the children who help navigate official documents and interpret for them. Reaching the hard to reach -- immigrants, both legal and illegal, people who do not speak English, the poor or those who live in marginal conditions -- has proven to be a challenging task.
Bureau officials went to Elm School in Oxnard, Calif., in part because of the high number of children who are learning English. Although there was a good response during the last census, Rodriguez said there are a number of "red zones," where responses were low in the city. Some of those communities include the large number of Mixteco-speaking farmworkers and other indigenous people, who originally came from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
There may be more than 12,000 indigenous farmworkers in Oxnard, said Antonio Flores, a community worker with California Rural Legal Assistance. Making contact with them is often difficult because they don't speak English or Spanish.
"In 2000 they didn't receive any information about the census in their language," Flores said.
He's now helping the Census Bureau by making connections with various social clubs and through one-on-one contacts. But because many of the families migrate with farm work and might live in garages or double up with other families, it is still a challenge finding them, he said.
And then there's the task of reassuring them that the information they give the Census Bureau is confidential, said Ron Perry, the directing attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance.
Many people who are here illegally fear that if they fill out the forms they'll be deported, Perry said.
That's part of the reason for the contacts in the schools, giving the Census Bureau an opportunity to make contact and inform families that the information they give will be held in confidence.
While talking to the sixth-graders, Karl Lawson, who heads up the Census 2010 Complete Count Committee in Oxnard, kept it simple. Making sure everyone is counted ensures that the city is allocated its fair share of government money and will also have an implication on how it is represented politically, Lawson told the students.
After giving them a quick rundown of what was at stake and giving the children a free water bottle and cookies, Lawson said he considered the sixth-graders "perfect ambassadors" for the Census Bureau.
"They're used to filling out forms for their parents and reading over paperwork," he said.
By starting to talk to the children now, sending home sample forms and explaining what is happening, the parents will be more willing and ready to fill out the forms when they are sent out in March, he said. The forms will have 10 questions and should take about 10 minutes to complete, he said.
Earlier this year workers completed a canvas that identified every address in the county. In February, workers will go out again to canvas neighborhoods.
